I had the same problem and, thanks to this post, was able to resolve it.
In my case the culprit was a program called CTHELPER.EXE, part of Creative Technology's Audigy software. After I found that out I thought it was significant that, for me, A:M would crash to the desktop just before the opening tips window opened and tried to play that bell sound that it makes.
From what I can tell, CTHELPER does things I don't need it to do so I used msconfig to turn it off. Haven't had any trouble starting A:M since.
